ɢɴᴀꜱʜɪɴɢ ᴛᴇᴇᴛʜ ᴀɴᴅ ᴄʀɪᴍɪɴᴀʟ ᴛᴏᴜɴɢᴇꜱ

[tobeclosetohim]

Who: Jo Harvelle & Co.
When: March
Where: Cadens; Horizon; Nocwich; Event Locals
What: Catch-all for March
Warnings: Mark of Cain, violence, alcohol, more to come


ᴄᴏɴꜱᴘɪʀᴇ ᴀɢᴀɪɴꜱᴛ ᴛʜᴇ ᴏᴅᴅꜱ
ʙᴜᴛ ᴛʜᴇʏ ʜᴀᴠᴇɴ'ᴛ ꜱᴇᴇɴ
ᴛʜᴇ ʙᴇꜱᴛ ᴏꜰ ᴜꜱ ʏᴇᴛ

Comments

[righteously]

She cups his cheek, and before he can help it, his eyes close. It's automatic sensory response, it's like the back of his brain decided to shut down all non-essential sense input to devote more processing power to that, to feel it more, to better commit it to memory. Her fingertips press, and his chin lifts obediently, obligingly following directions, bypassing any thought processes like his code's been hacked.

His eyes flutter open again to look at her, pained and exposed. Cut open and splayed out for easy reading.

Before something you can't take back happens.
It already did.

I chose you.
He shakes his head, chin nudging incidentally against her palm in his quiet protest.

He opens his mouth.
I'm not worth it.
I don't know if there's an after.
He closes his mouth.

He's been thinking about something since before she came in. Been thinking about it in the back of his head for weeks, actually, but never found the time. Never seemed relevant. Now, he knows that's stupid. She might've needed it earlier. What if she had, and he just never got around to giving it to her?

He shifts, pulling gently away from her touch — only so he can reach up behind his own neck. For his fingers to find the worn leather chord there, so he can work it loose from beneath the fabric of his shirt and pull it over his head.

As slowly as he moved before, he keeps that pace as he carefully rises to his feet. A fleeting moment of debate that isn't really a debate, and then he offers something out.

The pendant is small, a faintly glowing blue. It's warm to the touch in a way simple body heat can't justify; the subtle feeling of energy it gives off when pressed against her fingertips will feel comforting, reassuring.

Take it.

[tobeclosetohim]

There's something so important here that it defies words but supplants an even deeper weight, a responsibility that can't be overlooked or unseen when a single touch cuts Dean off at the knees. There aren't any words, and there isn't any fight. It drains out of him, and he's instantly leaning into her palm, shifting with the most minor request of her fingers, as though there's no will left to fight her.

God. She wants to wrap her arms around his head and shoulders, pull him against the center of her body, and promise to fix it all. Whatever it requires. Wherever it might need going to. Whoever needs to be broken on the ground. Whatever price she needs to pay. It's so staggering and absolute when he's a book ripped open, warm against her fingers, barely able to shy off from her words, the imploring, ever spinning, and falling pain in those green eyes all that she can see in the world suddenly.

It's slow, but he moves again, pulling away and removing something. She's seen it before, here and there, but remembering to ask about it later had always slipped her mind. It's in his hands, as he's standing, slowly and steadily again, with so little space (and for the first time, she does swallow against a dry throat when he's back to towering over her in that so little breath of space between their bodies), but then she's looking down, catching up with the second she'd lost.

To where his hands are pressing the small silver and blue orb into hers. It's warm and cool, caught there between their hands. Her shoulders sag a little, and her head tilts; her whole body seems to sigh and breathe out from every part of her, and she wonders if it's the small thing or his touch. The loop of both.

Jo looked back up at him. "What is it?"

[righteously]

Were this moment not so tender, not so real, he'd make some stupid offhand joke of a comment like it's a necklace. He doesn't do that now. This is beyond the realm of appropriate for sarcasm, even for him. This is sacred ground they're treading on, and he is nothing but sincere here.

"Magic," he answers, because he's not sure of a better explanation for it. "It's got a protection spell on it, don't ask me how, I don't know, but..."

He presses it more firmly into her hands, and then his own fall away, empty.

"If you're not gonna- if you're gonna be stubborn and screw common sense, I want you to have it. Just- in case something happens." He nods his head at it. "It's one-time use, worst case scenario, okay? It's not a free-for all, it's not a shield, but... if- if something lethal were to go down... this thing would stop it."

It's not everything, it's not bulletproof, but... it might be enough. Sometimes, all it takes is a window of opportunity to make the difference.

If he ever snaps again, maybe it'll blast him off long enough for her to put a bullet in him.

[tobeclosetohim]

Jo's looking back down at it, and her mouth twitches at the edge at stubborn and screw common sense, but she can't force herself to smile. Or, she could; she forced herself to come here, like it could just be normal—because it wasn't, but it had to be as close as they could get to it with her blood and his fingerprints on everything. She could smile, but she doesn't feel it, and it's not a lie either of them needs. Nor is he wrong.

Sounds like her. Sounds like a million things her mother said.
(Is her mother rolling in her grave? Woken up somewhere in a cold sweat?)

Even more, those words aren't being thrown at her like weaponized landmines that will explode before she can take another step. And there's a small, small part of her that wonders if he gets that he doesn't really have it in him to have a fight with her right now. Someone else, maybe. But she doubts he really could with her this soon. The same day. That either of them could. He doesn't like it, doesn't have to like it, and she's not even sure how it will work, but he's not arguing it. It's a good enough second step.

Jo lifted it up and slipped it over her head, using both hands to pull her hair out of the loop of the cord behind her head so it could fall against the back of her neck. Reaching up to center it, small and hard and warm, between her fingers and her thumb, before looking back up at him.

[righteously]

He appreciates that she takes it. That she slips it on without a fight — because she's right. He doesn't have it in him to fight with her. Not now, not so soon, not her. Her wearing this is the closest thing to compromise they're going to get, all things considered.

For a moment after she dons it, it's quiet. Her looking up at him. Him looking down at her, something like conflict etched into the lines of his otherwise resigned expression.

At length, he nods once — at her, at it.

"Don't take that off until this is over."

This. His mark. His issues. His whole... deal. What over means, exactly, is up for interpretation. She can read it as until we find a cure. He means it as until he's out of the picture.

He's already got plans. Already laid the groundwork for it. The last favor he's ever gonna ask from Geralt, who's already been prepped to deliver it for months now.

They just gotta get him back first. After that...

After that, the problem's getting solved.

[tobeclosetohim]

It's the conflict rippling across the dark of those green eyes, that expression that gets to her (not the resolution; not the far too intense drive to the words, half order and half need so deep it makes desperation a pale shadow). It's everything under it. That boy locked inside the jaws of a monster, being used as a puppet to a force he can't control, that every single one of them should fear. And they do. She does.

She is. There's a part of her humming with a terror that is instinctually deeper than breathing.
But it's not of Dean. And she keeps having to repeat that to her mind, her body.
She's terrified of what The Mark can do (has done; will do), not Dean.


Every ounce of preservation says run. But not her heart.

And when has Jo ever listened to anything else?



Jo does it slowly, not looking away from his face. She reached out for his right hand and pulled it up. Did, what she bet every single impulse in him was terrified of, ashamed of, would instead run from, said he couldn't. Maybe ever. Not now. She placed those bruised, scabbing fingers, which might still have her blood on them, against the same side of her face where something had given sickeningly not so long ago. Her fingers soft and so much smaller over his. Both sides solid and unbroken.

"Hey." It's the barest whisper. "I'm okay."

And maybe it means nothing those words define as, and perhaps she's all but a breath from certain she could not manage to hold still if his hand slid down to her neck. And her pulse is beating too hard in too many parts of her. But she can do this much, and so she does. Because she can't think about doing anything less for him. She can be here. With him. In the center of it all.

"And I know you're not, but none of us are giving up."

Not Cas, who told it was good she wouldn't leave,
or Sam, who didn't stop her from coming here.

Or her. Belly of the beast and still certain.

[righteously]

Dean can take a lot of pain and keep on trucking — he could even before the mark. He can take a knife, he can take a bullet. He can take claws and teeth and fangs, punches, slaps, cutting words, monologues about his sins. He can stiff upper lip his way through any of it, stone-faced like a god damn champ.

But when it comes to soft touches, when it comes to tenderness, it's his kryptonite. It always has been. He crumbles like wet god damn tissue paper the moment someone alights fingertips on his skin and forgives him for his mistakes.

It's the kind of pain that pierces through his heart, straight through the armor, straight through the walls, precision pinpoint deadly accuracy.

She does it now, and he feels himself faltering again. Feels that leash he's got on all the crap he's trying to maintain start to waver.

Hey, she says, I'm okay, and it's the simplest thing in the world. It's the heaviest thing in the world.

It pulls at him magnetically, and without thought or decision, he finds himself ducking down to meet her. Leaning into not just the touch, but her; dipping down the great length of their height disparity until his forehead presses against hers. He nudges gently, pressing into the contact, animalistic but utterly gentle.

There in that space, with his eyes closed and the world gone small and private, he finally whispers his hoarse, "I'm sorry."

He is. He means it with everything in him.

[tobeclosetohim]

And this is why.

This part. That makes her chest suddenly drop out, utterly hollow, and her eyes go straight past pricking up into almost watery in a way nothing, since it happened, has yet managed to overwhelm her into. The touch of his forehead. The way his eyes close, even as she stares at his face with all the space gone as he says those words.

This is so much worse. Than the blank, unseeing rage in his face. Than having no warning. All her instinctual trust of him gutted in mere seconds. Than the terror left lingering in her bones. This is why she had to be here. Today. Right now. Even though it's not fair, to either of them, and it's not. None of this is fair or good or sweet or romantic. That she has to do this. That he had to do that. None of it is what they signed up for on any of the many lines that led them here, at home or in this place. But they were not so often any of those things every day, were they.

And those two words own it all.

The action. The pain. The helpless.
The utter lack of control, and where it fell out.

The way there is no way out of him holding on to the fact he did this. Has to apologize.
His hands. Her body. Chose The Mark. Chose the fallout. For not fixing himself already.

All the things she doesn't carry for him, or this at all. Jo's hand moves. The smallest twitch first, before she can leave that hand there at her cheek alone, without her own like some guard rail, necessary and too much all at once. Shifts to his cheek, his neck. "I know." It's so soft. She knows. She knows him. She shifts. Just for a moment. Leans up, placing a kiss on his forehead. Mummurs it into his skin. "I do. I know."

"C'mere." She pulls him closer. Into her arms, hand sliding up to cradle the back of his head and pull him into her shoulder. "I've got you."

[righteously]

It's all kinds of wrong, he knows that in the back of his mind — the fact that she's the one comforting him right now. She got hurt, she got beaten down into the dirt by somebody that's supposed to be on her side, supposed to look out for her, and yet here she is turning around saying I've got you. She's the one that needs the support, she's the one that deserves to be consoled, but considering he's the one that struck her, he's the last person on the planet that ought to be the one to do it. It's messy. It's backwards, and twisted.

But all the same, he winds his arms around her waist as she drags him in. Hesitates for all of two seconds, before burying his face into her shoulder, into the place where it meets neck. There, he breathes. There, he squeezes his eyes shut and just hangs on.

For a while, for long seconds, that's all there is. Her hanging onto him, him hanging onto her, hiding in the spaces she's offering, radiating outwardly all the pain and regret and fear that's been consuming him. It comes off of him in waves, feelings so densely packed and so rarely aired, in this moment they're made palpable.

He doesn't let himself be comforted often. He doesn't deserve to be.

But god, he fucking needs it, doesn't he?

It's gonna be so hard to say goodbye to her a second time. Maybe, selfishly, he's a little glad he won't be the one left around this time to have to feel it.

Eventually, after seconds or minutes, he detaches. Pulls back abruptly, with a soft clearing of his throat, with a hand absently coming up to swipe at spilled tears beneath red eyes that roll to the ceiling, wordless. They're scrubbed away and completely unacknowledged. All he says is a rough, short, "Okay."

Okay, he has to reel himself in. Okay, he's gotta close up, or be consumed. They can't stay in that moment forever. Okay, as in they're okay — save for all the ways they're not, but he's not gonna talk about those, either.

[tobeclosetohim]

He comes in a wave, and somehow, for the first time in all of this—not just this, but maybe since she arrived, when he stood there staring at her in alarm—she knows as he moves with her hand that she had no doubt he would. Even still, it catches her in the teeth, just under hard as another hit, when what overwhelms her senses after that thought is the whole physicality of Dean's body pressed in on hers. How tall, and large, and built he is.

Arms wrapping around her drowning tight, facing pressing in hard to thin skin, and there's a frisson in whatever place her teeth attach to her jaw and her jaw to her spine, her spine to every bone, and every bone to every nerve, about whether she actively, physically can do this. If there's a limit past which she can't force her body. (But she knows there's not. She proved that. Geralt proved that. Dean proved that. She did more than this while actively dying

She's not dying right now, so she can do this too.)

That her body spikes a wave of panic it only recognizes as the familiar pressure from being covered, straddled, fully bodily, earlier, she can't stop—but she can throw that desperation, that fear into the way her hands grip onto him, pushing on her toes, pulling him closer, trying to touch, hold, as much as him as she can reach, feed fire into fire, refuse to push him away, to fear this. This utterly rare, all but not allowed to exist thing he lets her have, of himself, that she's sure could shatter and break, more than just this moment, if she let her impulses cause her to skitter back even slightly now. So she can't. So she doesn't.

She rides it. Makes it any other terror they have to live with,
side by side, night by night, in this job, this life.

If you aren't scared, you aren't doing it right.
If you let the fear run you, you aren't doing it right.

She holds on to the desperation of his hands, to the hard press of his face into her shoulder, into her neck. To the wetness on her skin there she doesn't think is her imagination. Into the way, she knows, just as deeply, that he hasn't done this. This month. Ever. Since he realized he brought The Mark back. He lets it break out of him, soundless and silent, barely there shaking, with a grip like death. Him hanging on to her by fingertips over the abyss. Full of so much need, desperation, fear, and every day making it worse. Each slip. This catastrophic one.

Maybe she is tearing up. Maybe she's past that. She can't tell. Her face crumpled, buried against his hair. Unable to make it better right this second. To save him, take it all from him right now. Jo buries herself into that grip, into hers, the refusal of her own skin and the even larger, deeper refusal to lose him. Let him go. Let this take him from them. From her. She pushes all she has into this thing louder than any of her words could be.

When Dean pulls back, it's as abrupt and suddenly empty as his crashing in was present, and it tears something she can't name or claim straight out of her, taking it with him. There's no up and down, and the first breath she hears herself grasp in is too ragged, watery, and shakes. While he looks away, and she has to, too. She's nodding to herself, and she doesn't know where any of her walls are now, everything is blurry in her vision, but repeats his word after he says it, for a moment the only rope that exists from freefall.

Quiet.
Certain. Not.
Understanding. "Okay."